Ah, the dreams of what you’d do if you won the lottery. It’s enough to help get you through a shift at work, bickering with your colleagues over the desk over the best things to do with the winnings.
Maybe you’re the kind of person who’d donate most of the money to charity, or perhaps you’d jump on a plane and leave the UK for Australia.
But whatever it is you dream of, you probably only ever imagine winning the lottery once.
Whereas this bloke managed to win it a whopping 14 times. Now imagine what you could do if you won the jackpot over and over.
It almost seems impossible, especially with it being so hard for you to win it just once.
However, Stefan Mandel used some basic maths to ‘beat the system’ rather than us lot relying on luck and our mum’s birthday.
The Romanian mathematician came up with a genius method, leading to him and many others bagging a fortune.
Teaming up with a group of investors to form a syndicate called the International Lotto Fund, Mandel targeted a series of lotteries globally.
In an old interview on YouTube, the economist explained his theory, which he called ‘combinatorial condensation’.
“Theoretically, anybody can buy all the possible combinations,” he said. “Any high school boy or girl can calculate those combinations.
“Nobody has ever developed a logistical system to lodge such a large amount of play slips. We were the only winners and that was it.”
So, take the lottery in Virginia, US, for example. Mandel calculated that with players picking six numbers from one to 44, there were 7,059,052 combinations to choose from.
And to make matters even more favourable with this particular game, players were allowed to print their play slips/coupons at home, meaning Mandel and his group could do so without alerting suspicion – even though what they were doing was totally legal.
In February 1992, on top of the $27 million jackpot, they took home $900,000 in additional prizes for the tickets placing second, third, fourth and so on.
This plan alerted the suspicions of the authorities, with an investigator in Australia contacting the Virginia Lottery to tell them not to pay out.
They claimed Mandel and his syndicate were involved in money laundering. However, they found that the team had done nothing wrong.
Mandel is now said to live in Vanuatu, having ‘retired from the lottery’. Speaking to Romanian newspaper Bursa back in 2012, he said: “I’m a man who takes risks, but in a calculated way.
“Trimming my beard is a lottery: There is always the possibility that I’ll cut myself, get an infection in my blood and die — but I do it anyway. The chances are in my favour.”